This is my third week in prison. No prospect of anything. After breakfast, it’s off to the “Klapper” as usual – paper bags, bakelite, screws, nuts and bolts. Yard walk, lunch and dinner.

“Why now?” Jürgen wants to know. In the spring of 1983, I received my call-up for the medical examination.

After various skirmishes with the police, the Stasi, the party soldiers, the district court and the arbitration commission, the time had come to start my escape straight ahead while I was still young and robust enough to bear the risks and side effects.

The only catch was that I was not yet 18 ...

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December 1983: Finally of age. What am I going to do now, my mother asked. Run away to the West, I replied. She was silent, as if she had expected nothing else.

No horrified speechlessness as usual after harsh words. Just a bloody adult conversation. Maybe the last of our lives.

Before I end up in the military jail in Schwedt because of some s**t and bigwigs concrete over my life, I'll try it, I added.

She remained calm. No contradiction. That was all she wanted to know.

When my training is over in six months, I'll end up in a shack like my brother, get a girl pregnant at the first opportunity and marry her, just so I can maybe get a better shack with the option of a prefabricated concrete housing.

And as soon as the child needed me, I would be drafted and later, as a reservist, pulled out of my miserable world again and again until I was completely adapted and finally rusty for big changes.

Better to force my luck now than spend the rest of my life hoping for a better one.

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